Sail boats from Bickford's Marina across from my workplace.  The marina was forced to close this summer, and we have been watching the slow clean up of the site over the last six months.  Boats have been relocated, a gas tank excavated, and cranes swing about hauling mysterious detritus into battered trucks.  What remains is elegant and spare.

I looked at an apartment here at the Beacon Marine Basin a few years ago, it featured porthole windows and a slip for a 14 foot vessel.

I didn't take it . . .

. . . I ended up here instead.

I drive by Cripple Cove every day on my way to work, but I never have time to stop and document.  Today I have the day off and went back to freeze my fingers on the shutter release button.  The lobster pots are stacked six high in careful arrangements spread all through the yard.  Gloucester in the winter is a quiet place when compared with the summer months, but because we are year round and my life doesn't change I barely notice the shift save for the ease in traffic, here though today I finally settled into the stillness of winter. 

It is not my place to provide critique or commentary on the 2010 Paris Couture Shows, you can find that elsewhere.

I just love this photograph from the Dior show with all my heart and soul.  Mixed incompatible textures, the quirky acidic gem stone palette, the majesty of it all. Inspiring. 

My husband has declared that the ceiling in the bedroom of our new home must be Fra Angelico Blue.  Having never been to Florence to see the The Day of Judgement, which is now located in the museum at San Marco, it took a tiny amount of research to determine what exact color this could be.

Fra Angelico used Ultramarine Blue for his commission of The Day of Judgement for the church Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, in 1425 this meant ground Lapis Lazuli with egg tempera as a vehicle.

Because the price of lapis runs roughly equivalent to the price of gold per ounce there are several synthetic options, including from Sinopia who has one of the largest ranges of historic pigments anywhere. I'm still crazy about Old Holland, but discovering Sinopia today has been a revelation due to their devotion to preservation and authenticity. 

Further investigation lead me to one of the only affordable sources of Lapis Lazuli pigment available from Andes Blue, a mining company in Chile.  Go for the gold, or stick with synthetic? 

N ow that we're leaving there are some things I will miss about the house we now inhabit, like looking down the patterned stairs.

And the color of real patia on brass.

I

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We recently moved our bedroom and office downstairs to the guest room to prepare for our new family member arriving in April.  Steve is stripping wallpaper and painting upstairs so it is even more uninhabitable than usual.

I don't know why we didn't do this years ago, it may be the best room in the house, as witnessed above.

It is a meltly kind of day for a snowman.

 The tanker came in closer to shore to ride out the storm.